CTRL: Essays on Video Games

CTRL is an essay collection exploring video games as a transformative artform and their impact on identity, storytelling, and the way we live.

This anthology of personal essays explore how video games have shaped our lives, our cultural imagination and contemporary storytelling. From novelists and critics to game designers themselves, the writers in this collection ask the question, ‘Can video games truly be art?’ 

From triple-A, big budget blockbusters like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, to quiet, meditative Indie games like Journey or Stardew Valley, video games, like all artforms, offer us insight into ourselves and the world around us. They help shape our identities, introduce us to other ways of thinking, new languages, alternate worlds. They can offer us escape. 

They can also offer us control. We reach back into the past to try and recapture the feeling of that first playthrough, the feeling of expanse, the feeling of control. Addiction is also touched on in these essays. Video games can become a replacement for a much more dangerous addiction, and the writers tell us candidly how video games helped; wasted hours in virtual worlds, completing tasks that had no bearing on a real world they couldn’t quite deal with. 

These collected essays explore the good and the bad sides of gaming; how video games are used as a cypher, as a new way of looking at the world, and indeed the impact they have had on the lives of the writers themselves. 

Featuring contributions from acclaimed and emerging writers, both Irish and international - including Rob Doyle, John Patrick McHugh, Una-Minh Kavanagh, Brenda Romero, Sheila Armstrong, Roisin Kiberd, and more - this anthology is an exploration of one of the most influential cultural forms of our time. 

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